Re-evolution of the Fragile Ego:A Path to Leadership’s Core

In each chapter the authors use examples to help you identify the behavior and root it out—which is not as simple as you might think. For the same reason it is also difficult to see in ourselves. Simple Sabotage is about the day-to-day routine interactions and processes we rely on as we work that are undermined by unintentional sabotage. We can envision these noble, resonant, and genuine leaders as icons of effective leadership. But these virtuous leadership attributes are not the essence of leadership effectiveness. Authenticity without a positive impact on someone else is more narcissism than leadership.

Effective leaders turn their emotional intelligence into helping others find their purpose and meaning. An underlying principle of effective leadership is that value is defined by the receiver more than the giver. This value-added principle applies in almost every relationship.

When I give my wife a gift, she defines the value of the gift. When I was newly wed, I got her tickets to sporting events and she often suggested I enjoy myself. I have learned that the real gift is figuring out what will be meaningful to her, not me. Likewise, effective leaders recognize and serve the stakeholders who are impacted by their strengths, authenticity, and emotional style. They then work to deliver value to these stakeholders in ways that matter to the stakeholders. When leaders focus on the value they create for others, they think less about who they are and how who they are, will make others better.

They realize that the value of their values is in that others will achieve what matters to them. Ultimately, leaders are measured by what they leave behind and how their present actions shape future success. Who do I want to make better because of what I do? Who will benefit from my choices today? How will my actions be seen by and affect others?

They are values that seem to be in opposition. Each value or characteristic supports and even makes possible the competing value. Robert Quinn has produced a valuable tool for understanding this concept in his book The Positive Organization. We tend to focus on the value that resonates most with us or the ones we are most familiar with. This often causes us to get stuck or to jump from one ditch to the other never realizing the true potential of our organization. This dynamic plays out in our personal lives as well. You will notice that each of the positive values in the inner circle is associated with a negative value on the outer circle.

If we champion one value over another we put our organizations at risk for the negative outcomes associated with each of the 20 values on the diagram. Every positive value without its contrasting value can become a negative in much the same way the overuse of a strength becomes a weakness. For example, we need some predictability and control in any organization, but too much leads to rigidity. We also need some spontaneity and self-organization for people to flourish, but again too much can lead to organizational and personal chaos.

We also miss the larger picture and usually misinterpret issues. A person who seeks a predictable, smooth running organization often focuses on disruptions and disruptive influences; the natural inclination is to fix those disruptive problems. When we focus on a problem, we are not seeing the whole system. We are paying attention to something within the system. Likewise, when we focus on a single person, we are not focusing on the culture of which that person is a part. When we have an agenda we tend not to see the whole picture.

As leaders we need to see the broader context of every situation. Customer value that is based on substance as opposed to perceptions is widely pursued by organizations that aspire to greatness, and is also a fundamental building block of the Lean management system. Leaders who aspire to excellence can gain much from studying this approach. Separating value from waste Toyota, who pioneered Lean methods in the wake of World War II, learned how to maximize value under dire circumstances.

For example, an assembler installing a mirror on a vehicle was at that moment adding value. Walking across the plant to retrieve a screwdriver while the vehicle sat idle, however, was considered non-value or waste. If there were more workers than necessary assembling the car, or more parts than needed in inventory, these were considered wastes that added unnecessary cost to the vehicle.

The key here is that the workpiece is treated as a proxy for the customer. This applies in any industry, whether the workpiece is a manufactured product, a meal in preparation, or an insurance claim under review. In healthcare, the workpiece and the customer are the same, making non-value activity waiting particularly visible and objectionable. In Lean organizations, all efforts are focused on the customer experience. To support this, Lean organizations drive improvement using metrics that pertain directly to customer value, such as defect rates, on-time delivery, lead times, and cost indicators such as inventory turns.

In a factory, the shop floor workers who produce the goods are the most important. By the Lean definition, non-production activity, including IT, engineering, HR, accounting, and yes, senior management, can only provide value indirectly through their support of production. This calls for some major role shifts. HR, instead of sponsoring leadership courses, might spend more time in the workplace helping employees develop problem-solving skills. Accounting, instead of trying to explain variances for the past quarter, might spend their time developing real-time reports to help production supervisors make better buying decisions.

And senior managers might step out of the executive suite and find out what more they can do to support their value-creating workers. When assessing whether an activity has value, everything stems from one question: Follow Jacob Stoller on Twitter. Avoiding a Kodak Moment. We will ultimately spend our life chasing the next buzz when things get dull.

There are two ways of looking at the world—give and get. Give is sustainable; get is not. This is a far cry from the way we casually toss around the word in our day-to-day conversations. Henry really gets to the heart of the matter. What he's talking about requires some concerted effort, vigilance, and courage to maintain this orientation as we go about our business. Otherwise it is easy to slip into the activities that only bring us comfort rather than meaning and purpose. How to Discover Your What. Why We Need Strangers. Fred exemplified an attitude of exceptional service delivered consistently with creativity and passion in a way that values other people.

How to Make Work— Work for You. Antifragile or How We Become Fragile. Do Leaders Really Matter? Leading Apple With Steve Jobs. Organizations must have a plan in place to keep the employees they have. A priority for many employees today, is career development opportunities. The Titleless Leader Leading without a title is about taking personal responsibility. We—the world—is in desperate need of people who will choose to lead whenever and wherever they can.

People are frustrated, angry, disillusioned, tired, and afraid. Not to mention skeptical, cynical, and distrustful. And those plaques touting people as the most important asset should be taken down. Not everywhere, of course, but in far too many organizations. But we have a choice. No one needs to appoint you, promote you, or nominate you.

What Russell is talking about here is a different kind of leadership that starts with what all good leadership begins with: It is taking responsibility for the outcomes in your area. Managers must participate enthusiastically and, more important, be able to demonstrate the skills they expect everyone else to learn. Leaders need to visibly communicate: How to Turn Your Team Around in Six Stages How do you transform a losing climate into one that fosters collaboration, innovation, and productivity? When Good Employees Do Bad: Restoring Your Ability to Choose We all like to think we are in charge of our choices.

But the fact is that most of the time we are reacting, not choosing. Most of what we label choice is habit. It can even lead us to think that we have no choice. Only when we pause—slow-down to think and reflect—are we exercising our ability to choose. Sadove , chairman and chief executive of Saks Inc. It starts with leadership at the top, which drives a culture. And that then drives results.

Never do you get people asking about the culture, about leadership, about the people in the organization. The Power of Habit Habits will always be with us. But how do you replace bad habits with good habits? More importantly, how often do we ask ourselves if what we are doing is really just a habit? We are less intentional than we think we are. Taking Your Purpose to the Next Level. Managing With a Conscience We handicap our potential when we think we have to exploit others to get ahead.

Succeeding is not a zero-sum game. Doing More With Less. Do You Have Moral Overconfidence? Most will behave well or poorly, depending on the context…. Business leaders need to remember that most of us have too much confidence in our strength of character. Nohria is exactly correct. Good leadership is humble leadership. Humility is living in truth. The truth about our limitations and an understanding of our proper relationship with others. Humility gives us a better understanding of how we are to treat each other. Without it we operate from only one perspective—our own. As leaders, we are to work with people, not over them.

It is far too tempting to think hierarchically and not relationally. A humble leader will close the gap between themselves and others. Humility manifests itself in understanding the need to learn. Authority disciplined by humility is teachable. It is merely an opportunity to learn from another perspective. If you stop learning, you stop leading. Leadership has a way of revealing our weaknesses. How Leaders Gain it and Lose It. Try Another Perspective Periods of crisis and testing are helpful for what they bring to our attention.

When things are going well it is all too easy to ignore the hard issues we would be better served by addressing. Times of testing show who we really are.

Leading Blog: A Leadership Blog: Personal Development Archives

What to Ask the Person in the Mirror While we might like to think otherwise, here is a fact about successful leaders: Successful leaders go through significant periods of time in which they feel confused, discouraged, and unsure of themselves and their decisions. They feel as if they should be somewhere else, doing something else. And un successful leaders go through the same thing. The trick lies not in avoiding these difficult periods; it lies in knowing how to step back, diagnose, regroup, and move forward.

Have a Nice Conflict! Reading Have a Nice Conflict was like listening to my Dad again. Behaviors are the tools we choose and use to support our self-worth. You can look at personal strengths like behaviors. They represent the different ways a person can interact with others to achieve self-worth. When a person tries one of these strengths and has success with it, they use it more often. Other strengths might have rendered poor results, and so they might tend to use those less and less. They become our modus operandi.

What are they overdoing? What are they really trying to accomplish? Most likely, their intent is not to annoy you. Conflict can happen when other people misinterpret your strengths. Information Overload and What You Can Do About It Knowledge workers think for a living to varying extents, depending on the job and situation, but there is little time for thought and reflection in the course of a typical day. Instead, information—often in the form of e-mail messages, reports, news, Web sites, RSS feeds, blogs, wikis, instant messages, text messages, Twitter, and video conferencing walls—bombards and dulls our senses.

A second interruption can result in as much as 5 minutes of recovery time. There are only four ways that you can change anything about yourself, your life, your work, or your relationships with others: You can do more of certain things. What should you be doing more of to build a positive, upbeat, happy work environment? You could do less of other things.

What should you be doing less of if you want people to feel wonderful about themselves every day? You could start doing something that you are not doing today. What things should you start doing that would cause people to feel happier about themselves and their work? You could stop certain behaviors altogether. What are the things that you are doing on a regular basis that you should discontinue?

If you are not sure about any of the answers to these questions, sit down with your staff, as individuals or in a group setting, and have the courage and honesty to ask them these questions: Adapted from Full Engagement! What makes this complicated is what Peter Drucker pointed out: Most work now requires knowledge, judgment, thinking, and decision making, and so it matters if people care about what they do.

You cannot simply give them orders and criticism. That rarely produces the kind of engagement you need. Other, less direct but more effective forms of influence—such as support, development, and encouragement—are needed that engage the whole person. Do you tend to focus on the work or on the people doing the work? In other words, do you tend to confront and criticize, or do you support people and give them what they need to do good work?

Adapted from Being the Boss: Hill and Kent L. If you want the numbers, you need the people. As a leader you need to know how to judge raw human talent. To develop talent, you need to become intimate with your people; to know the essence of each individual. And they institutionalize this skill to create their own supply of good judges. It simply must become part of the culture. Talent development is not an event. It is a process. To make it sustainable it must become part of the culture.

And no one needs to understand that more than the CEO. When you have an organization devoted to a person, you have a cult. When you have an organization devoted to a set of principles and values, you have a culture. Developing people simply must be a priority from the top down.

The leadership team understands that the top priority for the future is developing the talent that will get it there. Fill leadership roles based on measured performance rather than just rough judgments and personal considerations. Differentiation breeds meritocracy; sameness the failure to differentiate people breeds mediocrity.

These are the values people live by; how work gets done. Insist on a culture of trust and candor. You can only develop your people if you have accurate information about them. You can only get that information is if you talk candidly. Candor gets the truth out. It enables keener observations, greater insight, and better descriptions. Create rigorous talent assessments. Elevate it to the same level as the CFO. Continuous learning and improvement. Transforming an Ordinary Moment into a TouchPoint. There will always be drama.

Landing in the Executive Chair. Our brains are hardwired to respond to nonverbal signals. This becomes very apparent when we are reacting to nonverbal communication from people from different cultures. Thus what might seem right in one culture may be ineffective or offensive in another. They operate under the assumption that being a critic means being critical. Many bosses operate the same way. They feel feedback is good only if it is critical or negative.

Adam Bryant suggests in The Corner Office , that we be a coach, not a critic. If you assume that most people want to get better, they want feedback and advice, that they want somebody to care about their future, then giving feedback becomes much easier. Feedback should not be thought of as an event.

It should be ongoing and in real-time. Everybody has their good points. Everybody has their bad points. If you can bring out the best in everybody, then you can have a great organization. From Values to Action. There will never be enough rules—there are too many variables—especially when people begin to direct their creativity in dysfunctional ways. The challenge is to develop sound minds.

As Kant determined, a person with a sound mind is one that can think for oneself, is able to place oneself in the place and viewpoint of others, and can think consistently and coherently. And we pay a price. To be sure, I am not advocating anarchy—we absolutely must have rules—and some rules unquestionably make possible the learning process, but when the rules we have in place reflect our lack of engagement, they become disrespectful and de-motivating. From time to time, it is good to think about the rules we have created or have had handed down to us , that are impeding progress, relevance, imagination and growth both for ourselves and others.

Here are a few thoughts to guide that process: What we have done may have served us well in a particular place and time, but may only be an irritation here and now. Rules can reveal a lack of trust. As leaders, we need to be aware of where we are blanketing people with rules and procedures that do nothing more than to serve us and not the people it is our intention to serve.

We need to consider that perhaps we have implemented rules to create a comfort zone for ourselves. A world where people act and think like we do. A world of clones. A world on autopilot that requires less of us. Often our need for rules and procedures is just masking our fear of the unknown. Our attempt to manage a world that is changing faster than we are learning.

No leader can do it on their own and rules are no substitute for not trusting, growing and building relationships with people. Where are we hiding behind rules? Given the chance, people will surprise us with new, different, and better ways to push our agenda forward. While these new models should not exclude the possibility of commanding and controlling, they need to encompass a much wider range of possibilities.

Making the Transition From Bud to Boss Often, when we are given a formal leadership role a couple of questions come to mind: Will they take me seriously? A promotion changes the scope of the kinds of things we have to think about. It changes the degree to which we have to regulate our behaviors, conversation and opinions. In short, it changes our relationship with everyone around us.

How will we handle it? What about old friendships? It can make us feel a little anxious and insecure. Leading Minds on Reflection Part 4. Leading Minds on Reflection Part 3. Leading Minds on Reflection Part 2. Leading Minds on Reflection Part 1. While reflection seems to have no place in a competitive business environment, it is where meaning is created, behaviors are regulated, values are refined, assumptions are challenged, intuition is accessed, and where we learn about who we are. Some of the greatest barriers to getting the results we want lie within us.

Growth happens when we stop repeating our habitual patterns and behaviors and begin to see things in a new way and in the process, discover the power to create the results we want. While of course mistakes need to be acknowledged and, one hopes, learned from, it may be more likely, from a purely neurological point of view, that a person will learn more from a success than a failure.

Of course there is the familiar purpose of giving the recipient encouragement, motivation and greater confidence, but recognition also promotes moral behavior through connection. Not only does this motivate her to do more and try harder, but it instills a desire to look out for the larger group….

It leads a person to do the right thing even when no one is looking. In our busy culture it is easy to overlook opportunities to acknowledge others. Noticing the positive is a daily challenge. In Shine , Hallowell offers these ten tips for promoting shine with the people you influence: Recognize effort, not just results. Of course, you want the results, but if you recognize ongoing effort, results will more likely ensue. Generic acknowledgment pales next to specific recognition. Try, as much as possible, to provide recognition in person. E-mail packs much less of a punch than human moments.

In meetings—and everywhere—try to make others look good , not bad. Scoring points off the backs of others usually backfires. As a manager, you should know that the self-esteem of each employee is perhaps your most important asset. Recognition is a powerful tool to preserve self-esteem.

Try always to say hello, give a nod of the head, a high five, a smile in passing. Tap into the power of positive feedback. Remember that positive feedback often consolidates gains better than learning from mistakes. Remember, as a manager, the more you recognize others, the more you establish the habit of recognition of hard work and progress as part of the organizational culture. Bring in the marginalized people. In most organizations, about 15 percent of people feel unrecognized, misunderstood, devalued, and generally disconnected.

Not only is recognition good for that 15 percent to help them feel valued, it is good for the other 85 percent as well, as it boots the positive energy across the organization. How do you make others feel valued? The Cycle of Excellence: They have never taken the time to ask. But, it is those you lead that determine whether or not working with you constitutes a great workplace. Even of you are not the CEO, you can create a great workplace around you. Do You Argue With Reality? Timeless Advice from a Father to a Daughter.

Are You a Hundred Percent Leader? Connection is the strength of the emotional connection they build with their people. You need to decide how much you want to challenge your people and how tight an emotional bond you want to build with them. The degree to which you challenge and connect with your people will determine the results you get.

Based on their research, Murphy has divided leaders into four basic types: With the challenges leaders face, appeasing, avoiding or intimidating can seem like necessary approaches; the path of least resistance. In practice, the four types are described this way: Working for the Appeaser. Working for the Intimidator. Working for the Avoider.

What kind of leader are you? Finding the Why of Work. The Face Game at Zappos. We Have Met the Aliens and They Are Us We live in a time—aided by advances in science and communication—that is obsessed with quantifying, labeling and optimizing. Generational studies are no different. While identifying and labeling the generations is valuable for understanding and discussion, if we are not careful we can lose some connection to their humanity—their sameness. While generational studies can help us to understand where people are at , if want to engage them, we would do well to remember what they are.

A generation comes and a generation goes. Each carries with them their own reaction to the former generation that raised them and their own disbelief of the reactions of the next generation to their own. Yet, each generation is not a new subset of humans; a curious new life form that needs to be studied and obsessed over. They are like us. Leading Outside the Lines: Mobilizing the Informal Organization. And that creates problems at work. Problems at home create, at the very least, distractions in the workplace. Many safety issues have been linked to preoccupied employees.

The failure to deal with issues that are brought to work can result in high turnover, poor productivity, low morale and poor communication. Their jobs can be lonely outposts in many cases. They must be the internal advocate, external promoter, chief relationship builder, and master of personal influence.

Their job is to identify the strategic value proposition between the companies and, at the end of the day, to be able to cultivate sponsors on both sides. This requires a special kind of leader. He has identified seven attributes to look for in alliance all-stars: You need versatile leaders, with hard business know-how as well as softer general management capabilities. Ability to synthesize quickly. An alliance manager often has to take a complex series of activities and issues and make it simple for everyone to understand how to resolve an issue.

They must have excellent written and verbal communication skills and be comfortable working with all levels in both organizations. They must understand the unique context that both businesses operate in, their strengths and how to align them to the benefit of both organizations. Global experience and sensitivity. Leaders need experience working around the world and with other cultures and market environments.

Ability to work in unstructured and ambiguous environments. Look for people who have demonstrated their ability to handle constant setbacks and rejections. Getting Your Relationships Right. Whatever Happened to the Rugged Individualist? It means being ethical. It means taking the lead in creating sustainable environments for both individuals and the world they live in. Get to know them as people. Know their skills, talents, goals and understand their potential. Ask them for their opinions. Stay engaged with your team members and know where they can benefit from training, mentoring and other forms of development.

Think of your team as a community with all of its diversity.

Similar authors to follow

Get to know their differences so you can leverage these dynamics. Show you care enough to listen. Get out and give people your complete attention and listen to what they are saying as well as what they are not saying. Communicate Clearly, Directly, and Honestly. This is one where we all fall short from time to time. Use ordinary words and say what you mean.

Encourage other people to share. Practice the Four Cast Member Expectations: Be on the lookout for people who are being excluded for whatever reason and bring them along. Have the courage to do the right thing, encourage your team to do the same and let them know that you have their back when they do. What Games Do You Play? Take the Greater Than Yourself Challenge. In Boeing was facing investigations into illegal business practices, there was the sex scandal, revenue was down, and key people were jumping ship.

I Hired Your Resume. After the obvious financial issues, the perennial concern over finding the right people to do what needs to get done was the issue of the day. This speaks to a larger problem of education, but makes all the more important the solutions presented in Who: The Secrets of the Millennial Generation.

Finding the right people is becoming a more and more difficult proposition. I enjoyed reading about Linda Zdanowicz's search for a dental assistant on her blog. Tony Wagner , author of the The Global Achievement Gap has written am important book that should not be ignored by business leaders. It sets a meaningful agenda for a good dialogue between educators and business leaders and concerned parents about our educational system. Wagner has written the following for us: Powered by Movable Type 3. Leading Blog Main Page Fierce is a global leadership development and training company that changes the way people communicate with each other.

They drive results for business and education by developing conversation as a skill. They believe that while no single conversation is guaranteed to change the trajectory of a career, a business, a marriage, or a life—any single conversation can. As a three-time Super Bowl champion, Michael Lombardi provides lessons in organizational culture, team building, strategy, and character. His philosophies on how to build championship teams were foundational for the teams built by both Walsh and Belichick.

Organizations of all types will benefit from the insights found here. The main lesson that comes through his experience with great coaches and owners is that culture comes first. No detail was too small for Walsh to consider because, to his assembly line way of thinking, only the sum of them all could produce the organization he wanted. As he was fond of saying, if he managed to perfect the culture, the wins would take care of themselves.

More than any other factor, inaccurate character assessment is why draft boards are to this day littered with so many mistakes. Winning is a habit. The measure of who we are is how we react to something that does not go our way. Your best player has to set a tone for intolerance for anything that gets in the way of winning.

A quick mind come with preparation. Born with it quality: Quarterbacks have to inspire. They can always look as if they have it all under control and that somehow they will figure out how to lead the team to victory. No one wants to follow a sulker. Quarterbacks who fail to gain the respect of teammates leave a team rudderless.

Even from a distance and after only a few throws, he could sense immediately if a quarterback could run his offense. Guys like Walsh and Belichick are unusual this way: They can visualize how skill sets fit in their schemes in a way that both maximizes those abilities and fuels the system. Doing what is best for the team when it might not be the best for you. Command of the Room. Followers need something to commit to. A leader has to have a plan. On Nick Saban at Cleveland: Command of the Message.

Personal accountability is the ultimate sign of strength. Sophocles sums it up best: The only crime is pride. Becoming an NFL head coach is a process. You learn on the fly. Command of the Process. A leader must be fair and consistent. In a particularly good section of the book, Combating Complacency he talks about how Belichick and Walsh fight complacency.

That clean slate demands a trip back to basic principles and fundamentals after a detailed examination of the current process. With the same kind of success in the NFL many lesser men have become close-minded, authoritarian, and lazy. Unfortunately, for many people, fluctuating feelings can run on overdrive in response to a society overflowing with negativity — think natural disasters, mass shootings, suicides and even a heated political environment all occurring with disturbing regularity. There are also stressful personal events in our lives that add to the swinging emotional pendulum, like the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship or the loss of a job.

By working to shift the residual emotional effects of stressful situations and embracing more positivity, we can strive to achieve enhanced well-being and professional success. For this strategy to be effective, leaders must start by taking a top-down approach to dealing with mental health in the workplace. Protecting our mental health is as essential as protecting our physical well-being. Stress, anxiety and depression are the most common forms of clinically diagnosed mental health disorders. Fortunately, many of these disorders can be treated with social supports however, in some cases, some individuals require medical intervention.

As a result, it can impact our lives in the professional world, costing businesses millions of dollars due to absenteeism, high staff turnover and presenteeism. So, how can you get started to ensuring that your employees have good mental health in the workplace? The Domino Effect of Positivity As an international speaker, mental health expert and author, I have been fortunate to travel around the globe throughout my career meeting with hundreds of business owners and entrepreneurs about mental wellness. The consensus among these individuals is that when you focus on taking care of your own emotional health, the resulting positivity has a contagious effect, especially when it comes to relationships between leaders and employees.

Executives at the top of the chain of command must start by looking for any signs of higher than average employee stress, including regular complaining, and anger or reduced or a boost in productivity. Here are three strategies to improve how you approach mental health within your organization: Understand that knowledge is power. Make a point of truly trying to understand the advantages of a mentally healthy work atmosphere.

A happier team equates to higher commitment, creativity and productivity. On the other hand, it is also important to realize the risk factors that can trigger poor mental health, such as lack of engagement, non-inclusion in decision-making, excessive workloads and more. There are numerous measures you can take to minimize these risk factors, including awareness of health and safety, greater autonomy, recognition of good work, promoting work-life balance and supporting career development.

It is also critical that business leaders are better informed on the current landscape of mental illness. The stigma associated with mental illness in our society tends to stem from unfamiliarity. Keep in mind, the great majority of people who struggle with poor mental health can be productive and valued employees when the proper support system is in place.

Take practical steps to help your organization. You can access the latest educational and training materials either digitally or in hard copy formats. There are also diagnostic tools, which allow for monitoring employees, that you can download and use, too. Please note that these tools do not replace the need for professional input, but they can serve as tools to help gauge basic general employee mental health.

Let employees know where to go if they need help. If you are facing a deluge of negative emotions amongst your team members, they may feel seeking help is an overwhelming prospect. However, if your company has policies and procedures in place that aim to improve the mental well-being of everyone on staff, there should always be a clear path for employees to engage with and share difficulties confidentially. Remember, as an employer, you are not expected to be a mental health expert — in some situations, a referral may be required.

The Bottom Line When leaders make conscious efforts to embrace positivity — even in turbulent times — we can help our employees experience increased positivity and more success. The statistics about making such efforts are telling: The long-term investment in mental health awareness, education and training will inevitably create returns that outweigh the loss of productivity in the professional world. He is an inspirational business leader, international speaker and mental health activist from Munich, Germany. Extraordinary Stories about Ordinary People. Today, he dedicates his time to fighting the depression epidemic and promoting mental wellness in the workplace.

You can connect with him on LinkedIn , Twitter and Facebook. We want to learn—to relate and interact.

Leading Matters: John L. Hennessy on the Leadership Journey

We want to connect. But over the years, depending on our upbringing, our schooling, and our work, our desire to engage gets suppressed. It gets covered up. Our job as leaders is to uncover and rekindle that child-like desire to engage with others and our environment. We can learn a lot here because teaching, like leading, is about serving others while achieving a result. Indeed, teaching is a function of leading.

We teach much more than our subject matter; we teach trust or distrust, courtesy or discourtesy, warmth or coldness —the lessons between the lines. The people we lead are not coming to us from our perspective. They have their own that has been years on the making. Bear in mind that you are teaching young men and women with an educational past that has shaped them. We bring our whole selves to work. Our hope, our scars, our dreams, our fears, our expectations, and our assumptions. Our childhood sense of wonder has been abused.

We are conditioned to want to be right more than we want to be accurate. Behold the class before you. They are not blank slates, nor are they ignorant. There is plenty written on those slates and your task is to rewrite much of that text— if they will trust you and if your good enough to get that close to them. They sit before you, thoroughly trained brainwashed might be a better word in ways of pedagogy that will determine how they hear you, what they hear and cannot hear, and how they will absorb what you say. We are not leading another version of us. We are leading a human being similar in form but different in substance.

These people come to you with layers of expectations that have been created starting in the first grade. Like an old kitchen countertop, they have been painted over and over. The oak, cherry, or maple cabinet beneath is smothered by an amour of paint. Thirty countertops, each covered with a dozen coats of paint, file into your room, take a seat, and open their spiral-bound notebooks. They know the drill; go ahead, start brushing it on. The sorrow of this parable is that they expect it.

They actually expect you to drone on, giving them fact after fact while they fill their notebook and worry about memorizing all this information. A leader has to peel off the old paint and get to that desire to engage that has been unwittingly covered over. We have to uncover the desire to engage. The desire to learn. The desire to connect. The tendency is to be instructing. We do need to instruct but it needs to be part of a larger, coherent story that people can feel a part of.

We are wired to engage. Our task as leaders is to uncover what is already there. Uncover engagement in your organization. Most executives today recognize the competitive advantage of talent, yet the talent practices their organizations use are vestiges of another era. They were designed for predictable environments, traditional ways of getting work done, and organizations where lines and boxes defined how people were managed.

As work and organizations become more fluid — and business comes to mean sensing and seizing new opportunities in a constantly changing environment, rather than panning for several years into a predictable future — companies must deploy talent in new ways. In fact, talent must lead strategy. To make this happen, they recommend forging what they call the G3.

Finding, recruiting, supporting and developing talent is mission-critical work in the organization. Beyond just administrative work, it must become a creator of value and competitive advantage. People appreciate in value. Another part of this is rigorously reexamining the organizations legacy processes and instilling a mentality across the organization that everyone should be developing their skills. Hold weekly meetings with the G3 to steer the company Stay constantly involved with those in your critical 2 percent.

You should personally know them. You should personally sponsor many of them. And you should constantly be looking outside the organization to add to their ranks. Put talent at the center of the board agenda, right up there with strategy and risk and compliance issues. When making any strategic move, start with the talent implications—you must know which leaders will drive value.

Pay as much attention to developing and executing the talent strategy as you do to product strategy or competitive strategy. Civility and respect are not the norm in daily workplace interactions. Our own observations make us keenly aware of these dynamics. Now there is research to - unfortunately - support our observations. There were few optimists among those interviewed. Three additional studies underscore the lack of respect and civility in our workplaces. This research and our own experiences make on thing clear: Disrespect and incivility erode trust, performance, service, and proactive problem solving in our organizations every day.

All is not lost. I work with senior leaders of organizations of all sizes and industries to help them create purposeful, positive, productive work cultures. Three steps are required to evolve your work culture. Define your desired work culture. Senior leaders must make values as important as results - and to apply the same discipline to formalizing values expectations and measuring values expectations as they do to formalizing and measuring performance expectations.

Values must be shifted from lofty ideals to observable, tangible, and measurable behaviors. By defining company values in behavior terms, those valued behaviors becomes measurable expectations. They defined the exact behaviors required with these three valued behaviors: I do not act or speak rudely or discount others.

I work to resolve problems and differences by directly communicating with the people involved. These behaviors - along with the valued behaviors from their other five values - make it clear what the minimum standards of citizenship are in this organization. Align all plans, decisions, and actions to your valued behaviors. Senior leaders must model and demonstrate these valued behaviors in every interaction.

Simply defining these valued behaviors - and marketing them like crazy with, for example, posters throughout your workspace - does nothing more than increase awareness. The only way to build credibility and inspire everyone in the company to actually demonstrate these valued behaviors every day is for senior leaders - and all leaders in the organisation - to model them in every interaction. The scrutiny is severe. The standards of interaction quality between senior leaders and everyone they interact with vastly increase. Building credibility will take time - months or more.

During this timeframe, senior leaders must not only model those valued behaviors, they must now coach those valued behaviors, praise aligned behaviors, redirect misaligned behaviors, etc. Aligning all plans, decisions, and actions to your valued behaviors becomes a never-ending project. What does some tangent on South Africa have to do with the above points Doug? Yeah, tell the truth about black vs. While no one likes being called a racist, some white people lose it if you call them a racist, however indirectly and gently you do it.

If that is not a fragile ego in action then I do not know what is. Imagine trying to make the claim that the black Supremacist had a fragile black ego. I think some of us know where it came from, and I know black people are the only people who are taking these problems to task because they know only they can do it. At the same time whites, as a people, have hardly been blamed for anything at all. Does this mean black people are subhuman after all?

Only someone with a sheltered, brainwashed upbringing would make a dichotomous conclusion based on absolutely nothing of substance.

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Why is it the whole black race and other POC have to take accountability for what one black person did that was heinous. Truth be told, everything on here has been said a million times before and in a million other venues. It exists mainly in the radical white liberal. But to claim it exists in the genuine white Supremacist is to make a self-evidently false claim. Truth be told, it would be equivalent to claiming that the black Supremacist has a fragile black ego. Dear ol Dr Grizlickson, where have you been, on vacation?

Good to see you are your good ol curmudgeonly self! Hey now, everyone needs a hobby. Yours is coming to blogs diametrically opposed to your views and metaphorically dropping stink bombs for comical effects! I told you that I no longer wished to converse with you but I will answer this briefly. The fact that you are here, trying to turn things around, to blame US and say that we are the ones that have the defect, on THIS blog…well that speaks volumes. May I suggest reading the post on derailment, tone and go back to africa. Also the secret course on whiteness is a good one for Doug and others like yourself.

You are aware that the very things you are saying is the foundation of this post right? And here I am not merely referring to the way in which so many people of color have been killed by police who saw their cell phones, keys, or merely black skin as evidence of danger and shot first, only to ask questions never. Here I am referring to the way that black and brown folks who are fortunate enough not to go the way of Sean Bell, or Amadou Diallo or so many others, nonetheless have their lives shortened by the racialized stresses that flow from life lived as a problem.

That allostatic load then corresponds to higher blood pressure, higher rates of heart disease, and early death. The research has found that even affluent black folks have higher markers for allostatic load than poor whites, despite the real stresses that the latter contend with each day. I had the same experience Peanut when i told my brother that a series of comments that he made which i thought were racist. Said all sorts of nasty stuff. He needed to just own it and then reflect like Abagond says. Calling someone out on racism is worse than BEING racist because in their minds, if you are aware of it, they can no longer hide and keep up the facade.

I never came off as a black supremacist from the very start. If there are black people with fragile egos, why do you think this is so? Were they born that way or were they the result of hundreds of years worth of destructive physical, psychological, and emotional conditioning?

Which is why so many whites react so harshly and are often afraid to call other whites out on their bigotry in this day and age. A fate worse than death, since they are nothing without that identity. Just a little angry. Truthbetold would never find herself sexually or romantically entangled with a black Supremacist because such a black man must have a fragile ego.

Brothawolf, It can be implied superiority. Like when you say that white people have something mentally ingrained in their head they are born with… it is implied inferiority. When Truthbetold states that whites must not be fully human because of many of her false assumptions, and no one argues with that….. Some of you have the same traits that you complain about on this post. People in general always look for the worst in their competitors, that is what you guys excel at. But sometimes you need to look in the mirror and pop your own zits. Now maybe your house will stand a little longer.

But sooner or later……. What seems off about some of these comments is that white people deny their history unlike the germans with the holocaust. But give us a few years and the US is by and large pretty open about its sins when its aware of them. Working together to bring down the white american male! Lets see how long it takes from our residet racist Doug to bring the jews into this elborate conspiracy of blacks and commies. What is better evidence for this rejection than your corrupted liberal notion that Supremacy equals degeneracy? Have you dave, honestly?

Then why is it, that so many elements of your posts are such that they could easily create disharmony? I know damn well you recognise that there are further factors that can be potential barriers when you are a POC — at times in your posts there are glimmers of light where you do show an understanding of this. Again, not because I think you really mean it, but because the conversation has moved away from what you want it to be about. A conversation where YOU have the voice you lack in day to day life. Has it ever occurred to you that this is what most of the commenters are doing here too????

Why do you ask brothawolf that question in the conditional? If someone can reconcile that a people whites are fascistic in their intergroup relations but that there is still redeemable aspects to anyone even whites , why would he need to engage in racial supremacist ideas like you and the others pursue. He has a much more nuanced, gradiated view of reality and people.

You take the dichotomous, categorical approach. I was always wondering why he flipped out so frantically and maniacally. It was the surprise of being revealed! The sad part was his comments revealed himself he was complaining that people at work got there through equitable hiring policies, not their work — a common theme amongst disgruntled whites. Black people allow whites to think and act as they do. We need to point the finger at ourselves as well. If a rat can get the cheese, it will be devoured. When whites play the denial card all the time, i laugh it.

As the enslaved minority in this country, we have to know the ways of whites more so than the opposite. This is what Dave and other whites on this blog fail to comprehend. We know where the rotten fruit is, continuing to lie to us is not accomplishing anything…Real Talk! In a nutshell, america will cease to be a relevant country without the european, judeo-christian ethos.

Listening to what Pat said about the issue brought the fragile ego convo full circle in my mind. Whites are losing their power, wealth, and whiteness as well. Why would the masses of whites on this planet think that the mirage of white supremacy would last forever, even a child can see thru that nonsense. It was all built on the backs of Africa and black people and native-americans as well. I choose to focus on the devil within, and we have a lot of those in our race…Sadly!!! There is a palpable sense of powerlessness there that can affect many of us at times….

I get the feeling that even if the day came when whites had to make a choice to accept the hand of a well meaning black or perish, I suspect that many would rather perish. I would thankfully take the hand. I will take it again and again if it is offered. Blacks have been graceful enough throughout the course of everything.

Offering it alone shows a Godliness whites mostly never could show. However the constant analysis of particularly negative stuff about white people on this blog just comes across as a sort of group therapy for black people. How about a change of subject for a bit?? Your link is to lying extremist lefty Tim Wise who I no longer ever bother to read as nothing he says can be trusted as anything remotely acquainted with the truth. Where is all the great blacks success in the world? Where oh where, and when oh when. Nowhere and never are your answers. It always seems to be those omnipotently evil whites who by hook or by crook, keep blacks from rising!!!

Something else you should know: It is his blog. He can write what he wants. If he wants to write about the price of ice in Antarctica he can! I read it because I find it interesting. Good luck with the therapy! I find it amusing that whites come on this blog and pester the owner of the blog to change his wicked ways!!!! What you see here folks, is called White Fear. America is changing into a Brown Nation.

What does that mean for white power? Or people who wear glasses? What does it mean for your identity? Will you be respected as white when white no longer exists? Perhaps Abagond can do a post on White Fear. I feel that we, as a nation, are on the brink of another Civil War. LOL Telling the blog author what not to write about. Get your own damn blog! This war is still waging, in my opinion. I should have made it clear that I find Abagonds blog interesting most of the time. Thanks for the good luck message though! I think me and Tyrone basicly are saying the same thing…… In alot of different ways.

The only thing stopping me is me. The same goes for the troubled souls on here. They believe we will do to them what they have done to us. That is the stem of keeping us down. I heard of a quote a while back that a white man would rather walk with another white man to hell than walk with a black man to heaven. Was he not Middle Eastern?

Why not deep bronze skin and dark, swarthy features? Is the ego so fraile that even Christ must look like them? If they think their Creator is a white man who hates everyone non-white as much as most of them do, there are no words to describe this obsessive need to feel superior. Dave Lister was just like you and the only reason he got banned is for using a sock puppet. I could show you. Stop trying to deny what you are…a bigot. Intelligence is always about proving a point Doug1.

Which you have yet to do. Sometimes a baby just has to cry. They have even less of a time to even consider the possibility that their brand of thinking is harmful to their growth. I know they will disagree with this article, call it part of a liberal agenda, continue to say blacks are this, that, and the other. So, they come here defending themselves underneath their essays of white accomplishments and why black people are bad. Hence, their egos are fragile. Let me ask you something Doug, what made you commit to this kind of ideology in the first place, and where did you learn this?

You look pretty damned white… You should probably change your picture or darken it up to maintain credibility…. I hope not you are comical! Besides, even if you are, there are probably more to take your place and then there is Randy and Thordaddy! When has this guy ever been coherent? Many lunatics sound sane until they start going off on tangents like Doug does. No, not at all. I wish you were a black Supremacist and then we could travel on frictionless parallel paths without holding hands like two little girls.

He FEARS those who attempt to find salvation in the creation of an earthbound enemy with god-like power. He truthfully FEARS those whose highest values are nondiscrimination and tolerance as he has no desire to join in this all-accepting indiscriminancy. Franklin Hispanic to me is like saying someone is american. You can have the full spectrum of hispanic people.

There could be a guy who looks full spanish, and he has more african and native then he does spanish in his dna. Apparently, you have no clue what I was talking about in my last post, so you went off on a tangent, with the hope that you would touch upon it. If in the political world the common acronym R.

Use your head more, and rant less. I come here to learn and give my two cents. In any case this talk about black liberalism and black supremacy is way off topic here. There are points on here that are excellent….. At some point you have to quit seeing Supremacy in relative terms as your liberal ideology requires.

Apparently you conflate the truth about dangerous white pathologies with someone trying to denigrate through being insulting. Even with your dressed up speech, you still project as blatantly as your average, inarticulate, and knee-jerking white person. Another day in the life of your hood Jay? I think people would respect your posts more Jay if you were honest about your motivation and agenda therein.

Your purpose seems to be to perpetuate the stereotypes and myths about BM in particular but, in order to reflect some kind of potential stark contrast between the crimes of some BM and WM which unfortunately does not really exist. Do you really think this will make BW other than janet who I have a strong feeling might pop up any minute feel enamoured towards you? BTW, most BW that he used to date never ended up staying with him as the core of his very being was so obsessed with race and BM in general, it became painful and destructive both to him and their relationship.

You are a tool. Stop messing with our heads with your crappy language. I get a headache reading his posts. Which is saying a lot — as a university student i have to read a lot of white pseudo-intellectual garbage. Ive read your work and Ive learned a lot from it. You write with a soulful intelligence that is profoundly moving. They take it personally. I agree to this philosophy but only when it comes to female supremacy! Men should realize who really runs them! They should bow down and kiss my feet ere I trod!

Especially whilst carrying my shopping parcels or handing over their paycheques! This is why I espouse pun intended polyandry, multiple husbands. Yes, we do have some philosophical similarities! It means you and all men should be in a female supremacist, polyandrous relationship! This philosophy thing is fun! Only a tiny few are permitted to escape. Lets just remember to be peaceful and accepting of all people despite their cultural short comings. Besides worthless comments and hate speech on an internet blog? Needless to say these same people have usually invented nothing.

Your comments of late have been wonderful and a help to me. It makes me so glad that I wrote the posts that I did. It looks to me like Black men have the most fragile egos. It makes the Black community look bad. Gotta ban all student read non-Black housing in the Temple neighborhood. Abagond is moving us away from people like you. So you can sit away in the corner alone. Talking to yourself about radical sexual autonomy. Yet you just did all those things. On a blog run by someone with a presumably fragile black male ego.

So there is something quite self-serving going on. In my experience, the most racist whites seem to be insecure while the least racist whites seem to be much more secure within themselves. I believe there is a foundational flaw in your thinking and it starts with your rejection of Absolute Truth. I read most of this post, as I do from time to time, and I have to say I find most of your contributions puzzling at times. Obviously you have an agenda here.

But you really seem to believe you have something of profound intellectual importance to contribute here. Otherwise why would you bother? Because after all its natural for man to strive for supremacy? Which brings me to this question: He does bring up a valid and great view. The natives were welcoming to the strange folks from europe, but to them the natives were seen as barbarians.

Some French and British intermingled and joined in the culture, some did not and instead resisted, destroyed, and imposed their own while disrepecting and raping any women they could. I would like to see more about this, perhaps the causes unless abagond has posted about this before.

And by trying to derail the topic into the fragile egos of black men is very telling. Again, Jay from Philly. What is your deal? Where did your problem you have with black men come from? Why are you so hung up on black male crime so much? Are you doing this to get with black women so much that you are so hung up on black male crime almost all the damn time like it was a fetish?

The fragility of your personal ego is evident seeing as how you constantly make it a mission to vilify black men in almost every single response in whatever post is made. And you do this in order to have black women flock to you, if it was truly the case? If not, come on. People like Jay and Doug have a serious complex about themselves if they constantly build white people up while putting black people down. An excellent observation Matari. This would be a useful question for thordaddy to explore. There already exists plenty of historical documentary evidence on what took place during these first contacts.

Perhaps these encounters also speak to the nature of the fragile white ego syndrome.

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But then this is the only sound basis for any ego. If he were to actually seek something so impossible to obtain it would only be because he became something entirely not-so particular. Particularly, the undisputed enemy of all liberationists. This site is almost entirely devoted to Abagond and his supporters building blacks up by putting whites down and blaming them and them alone for all black problems. Then perhaps Neo-Prodigy can give you another standing ovation…?!!! Your statements seem reminiscent of an Oracle:: Well I am sorry to say but its YOU who are wrong here.

Its ingrained…its built in…its a prior. So the onus is on you show why this is not the case. This is where that historical research, if you could be bothered to it, would come in useful. But even if I was to accept your belief as some form of absolute truth. Your logic is flawed. You equate equal with sameness. Anyone can see this is flawed reasoning. We can say men and women are equal, as human beings, but they are not the same.

We can say a white supremacist is equal to a Black supremacist but would you argue they are the same? But then so too a Black supremacist…. So which came first the particular Black supremacist or the white supremacist? That should answer your question about degeneracy. I addressed the reasoning by using it on a different group of people. They often blame their situation on racism. It proves you were able to predict how some people will react to your point. This post is about the fragility of white people when you call them out on their BS. What does that prove? Fire will burn you! Says this while sticking his hand in a flame causing his flesh to char and smolder.

Instead of analyzing the statements both I and Abagond assume they are true and try to predict how people will react to them. I am just amazed at how the post goes over his head, doing just what it says without any apparent sense of irony. I am not even sure he passes the Turing Test for human intelligence. Agrees with the idea, that saying certain things is wrong or a symptom of a personality disorder?

He is disagreeing so he is ignoring your guidelines. So, you are only partially correct. My former statement would be incorrect if Abagond stated pure conjecture, which is not the case. The behaviors listed in this post are objectively observable by anyone of any race. What interpretation you accept in the real issue. In this case, fire does indeed burn and prediction has nothing to do with it. I agree with SomeGuy: This post is based on patterns of behaviour I have observed among whites and from what I know about abusive, narcissistic people.

An opinion based on facts is still an opinion. The fact, that fire can hurt you, is. Firstly, as a matter of fact, abagond has deleted some of my comments here but unlike some other white commenters I do not whine about that. There has been issues and threads were I have not agreed with him or others here. But you might have missed those occasions. Secondly, I am not a far leftie, socialist or communist. I am a humanist. From your political point of view that may look like extreme leftist as fascism is in the opposite end of the ideological spectrum. Thirdly, it may look from your view point that those facts are distorted since they do not match with your fantastic ideas of reality or facts.

Following your own logic, fire does not have to hurt. It is just a matter of opinion based on facts. Also do you know any truth that is objectiv? If you do, you must be really simple and also quite lost. Your world view is subjective too. The question is this: In my opinion you represent the intellectual level of a year-old and I really do not enjoy discussing things with you. Say what you gotta say, regardless of who enjoys discussing things with you! I will simply say that I disagree with you.

An opinion is primarily a belief or judgment that rests on grounds insufficient to produce complete certainty. An inference is the process of arriving at some conclusion that, though it is not logically derivable from the assumed premises, possesses some degree of probability relative to the premises. Both are not quite solid as facts. However, one is arguably more based in objectivity than the other. That slight difference is vital.

To provide contrary arguments and facts, to somewhat offset the utter black fantasy land that this place mostly is. I like intellectual argument. I like engaging those opposed sometimes. I used to engage Obsidian in various places. I agreed with him on some things. Somewhat but not as much.

I consider myself one too. As to the first two, rubbish. Lefty elites overriding popular white majority views in Euro and offshoot countries. Especially with regards to history, my views are generally the same as the left of center but not far far left consensus today. Yours are far far lefty, endlessly whites blaming, believing that all racial groups have equal intelligence and other abilities west African blacks on average excelling whites in some.

Most people here are basically done with you. If you do not have a fragile ego then why in the world do you seek intellectual argument on a black fantasy website frequented by low-IQ people? I thought intellectual people seek an intellectual platform with intellectual people. If Doug thinks the people here have low I. I mean there are more important ways he could use his brain power instead of wasting it on low I.

Which is to say, all your relative truths mist be grounded in an Absolute Truth to be given any kind of consideration. Allow me to explain where I think that dysfunctionality is creeping in. Re-examine one of your last statements:. This is the whole basis of your being. Surely you can understand this now? For your information…a belief in the equality of all things is nearer to an absolute truth than a belief in the supremacy of one thing over another.

Such a monumental undertaking is really a life-time work-in-progress. But the light at the end of the tunnel burns so bright. And to claim that striving towards Supremacy is evidence of dysfunctionality is just nonsensical. I believe there is both a logical necessity for and empirical evidence of Supremacy that would suffice those confined to strictly material world such as yourself. This getting seriously funnier, considering the right wing politicians who are at helm of EU in general! I guess these kids get nervous when a really pure white european does not agree with them, which is funny as they claim to speak for all the whites and represent the wahite master race!

Oh I see… So you are striving towards this goal of Supremacy but have not found it yet? So the obvious question for you to answer is what is stopping you from reaching or finding it? Further,,,If you are striving towards Supremacy but admit, in your words,.. Then where are you now? Do you actually believe in equality default position but are still striving to find something better, something else?

Entertaining and maintaining this falsehood of Supremacy is where you go dysfunctional and keep breaking down! Why have you not done your research as I requested and suggested of you several comments ago? Where is this evidence you speak of? And…contrary to how you may wish to portray me here. If I truly believe in equality then it would mean if you should find this holy grail of Supremacy it would imply that I too must be Supreme in some unknown form as well!

So whats to be offended about that? I assure you that I can and have defined racist and racism here many times. In fact, those definitions are by no means unique and are a commonly held belief by many PoC and clued in whites. Especially not with your attitude. Of course, you cannot do that because you do not use a precise definition. Second, why would you engage in intellectual arguments with people you consider as having low I.

Maybe because you think you can win? Third, What could you possibly know about black reality period? Yet, you parade in here as if you know black people more than black people. Doug is that kind of white man who is filled with self doubt. Doubt of his own intellect, his reasonings and, yes, even his racism. Yes, white people doubt their racist beliefs when they encounter intelligent blacks. It comes out in the form of anxiety. Doug is the worst kind of white man.

His pseudo intelligence is all he has to claim in this world. He will never learn anything because to him, he already knows everything. Especially about black people. Especially about black relations. All of us, as people of colour. I would prefer to discuss handbags, footwear, clothes, Belgian chocolate, software etc. I mock these goofy posts, but in doing so I stay on topic for the most part. When I go overboard, Abagond deletes my comments. But it is his blog so he can do what he wants with it. But then again his feelings are hurt. This guy sounds like a broken record.

So in effect, you really have an inferiority complex. You can do whatever turns you on! This makes you a self- sexualizer and a self-annihilator all rolled into one. It seems so prominent that you see nothing positive with us. There could be explanations behind it that relate to this topic. All I know is that you have an obsession with the issue of supremacy, yours and that of blacks, and a disdain for liberalism. That is a big shocker. It is because the racism is based on racial stereotypes and nothing else, as we have seen here many times, and when they discover, usually by accident, that the Other is actually just like anyone else.

He just ate his lunch, washed his hands and went back to work, goddammit! One older white guy looked at them for a long time and then, after a long silence turned to his wife and said in very low voice: The father and mother of the bride were a bit apprehensive but got along but the grand pa was having none of it. He was really old school racist. He talked openly how he had been in the Klan when he was young and all that, how proud he was about being white man, how he hated blacks etc. During the wedding process, planning and such, he had to meet the Other folks from time to time.

He had to pick up stuff, pick up the grand mother of the black family and drive her around, which was almost hilarious to see. At first he was puzzled. Then he was angry. Then he became suspicious. Then he started to wonder about his own ideas. Then he broke down. That old guy had been conditioned to be a racist all his life, to hate, to be violent. But when the black family was just like any other normal average family, actually more functional and normal than his own, the old guy just broke down when he realized he had been carrying racism in him for no other reason than being brought up to it.

When, at the heat of the wedding frenzy, there was a loud arguing going on, the old guy said to the black son in law: Racism was broken by normalcy. Boring, mundane, every day normalcy broke it. That is how fragile it sometimes is. All you have to do is accept. Go be a black Supremacist and be more free than you ever imagined. Heck, you will even separate yourself from the white and black degenerate alike. Yours are witty and comical observations often beyond the comprehension of intellectually challenged fragile egos regularly posting here.

But at least you present them with opportunity of striving towards meeting that challenge! Truth be told… Yes that was a pun! I have already engaged with thordaddy and found him wanting in his ideas and beliefs. And now that seems to apply to his own sense of humour when I repeated his own sentence phrase back to him:. Yet another sign of how rapidly dysfunctional and fragile that ego has become. All because, paraphrased using your own words thordaddy:.

You know why I love being a race realist instead of joining the ranks of racial egalitarians like all of the white posters here? For all the whites who are so egalitarian here, what life choices would you have to undertake in order to prove your beliefs? If blacks are so equal to whites in criminal tendencies, and the statistics of their criminality only based on a racist system, then that would mean inner city Detroit or St. Louis would be a prime location to move you and your white family.

Why do you prefer the same neighborhoods and schools that I myself do? Why do you send your children to predominately Asian and White schools like I do? In these black communities the home values are cheaper and the community is made up of those high moral, low criminal blacks persevering against white privilege and racism that you so adore.

So yes, I guess I am projecting as ad hom and psychological attacks are very prevalent amongst you anti-racists. I suppose that gives me the right to say that exact same thing. But then…I know better than that. Your not a race realist, your just a racist and nothing better. You are so right!!!! All black people live in poor, violent ghettos just like on tee-vee! Because the people on tee-vee are truth tellers!

I could not help myself. I was born with criminal tendencies.